Border Crossings

Dr. Paula Ruth Gilbert spent much of hr fall 2008 sabbatical leave in Paris, after having traveled extensively over the summer--including Australia and Papua New Guinea.  Her last book, Violence and the Female Imagination:  Quebec's Women Writers Re-frame Gender in North American Cultures, was nominated for several awards. She continues to research and write her new book, Human Rights, Gender Rights, and Narrative:  Reading Representation and Reality.  She is also completing two co-edited volumes: Transatlantic Passages:  Literary and Cultural Relations between Quebec and Francophone Europe; Confronting Gender Justice:  Women's Lives, Human Rights. She enjoyed her fall 2007 course on the French-Canadian writer, Gabrielle Roy and her spring 2008 course on "Nineteenth-Century France through Film and Opera."  She directed several successful M.A. theses and papers.  She will teach the "Nineteenth-Century Novel" in spring 2009 and take students to Paris this summer.  She continues to teach and research half-time in Women and Gender Studies.

 

In spring 2008, Dr. Janine Ricouart published a collection of essays entitled Visions poétiques de Marie-Claire Blais co-edited with Roseanna Dufault. In July, Janine presented her work on Blais entitled “Vision politique dans Naissance de Rebecca à l’ère des tourments (2008)” at the Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones in Limoges, France and in November, she presented a study of her latest work, “La théâtralité dans Les rouleurs (2007) de Madeleine Monette,” at the American Council of Quebec Studies conference in Quebec City.

 

Dr. Lisa Rabin’s recent research and scholarship has centered on heritage language preservation and the settlement house movement in the United States. Her article “Language Ideologies and the Settlement House Movement” will be published next year in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. She gave a talk on this work at the MCL Faculty Research Forum in September. Lisa also won a national 2008-2009 Community Grants Partnership from the American Studies Association which allowed her to fund Mason students Noelia Olivera and Catherine Berrouet’s teaching of an adult bilingual ESL course in Culmore, Virginia. Lisa is offering a training course for future interested student-teachers in the Culmore program with Mason’s Center for Field Study in summer ’09. Most recently,Lisa and colleagues Jennifer Leeman and Esperanza Román-Mendoza received a CHSS research grant and submitted an article on community heritage language programs.

 

Ramón E. Planas, Jr. has taught conversational Spanish to the faculty at Falls Church City Public Schools for 3 years. Alsosummer Educational Testing Services has contracted with him to serve as a Table Leader, guiding and helping other Spanish teachers and professors to correct Spanish Advanced Placement exams in summer 2009. This is his 24th year working for the College Board Advanced Placement Program.

 

Dr. Esperanza Román-Mendoza presented at two conferences abroad on the implementation of  Web 2.0 as an instructional tool. She taught two online courses on e-learning tools and pedagogy to more than 70 students located in Europe and Latin America. Her book chapter on the uses of content syndication in language learning will be published in an edited volume in the first quarter of 2009. She has received a grant from the Technology across the Curriculum/Writing across the Curriculum program at GMU to implement wikis and other social web-based tools in her courses and her community projects. With colleagues Leeman and Rabin, she received a CHSS research grant and submitted an article on community heritage language programs. She was invited to present her scholarly work at two universities in Germany in January, and will be reading a paper at CALICO 2009 in March.

 

Dr. Kristina Olson has an article forthcoming in the January 2009 Italian issue of _Modern Language Notes_ entitled, "Resurrecting Dante's Florence: Figural Realism in Boccaccio's Decameron and Esposizioni." The fall course, ITAL 325: Dante, will be a pilot course for the NEH virtual humanities project called "The World of Dante."  This website, created by Deborah Parker at the University of Virginia and funded by several organizations, including the NEH, can be found at www.worldofdante.org.

 

Dr. Tatiana Vasilyeva published the article “Russian Phraseology in Culturological and Pragmatical Context” In: Slavenska frazeologija i pragmatika., Knjigra Publishing House, Zagreb, Croatia, 2007, pp. 277-280. In the 2007-08 academic year Dr. Vasilyeva taught the following: Russian 110 Elementary Russian; Russian 102.002 Elementary Russian; Russian 302/302 Russian Conversation and Composition; Russian 480 Fourth Year Russian.

 

Dr. Elaine M. Ancekewicz (M.A., M.Ph., Ph.D. Yale, B.A. Cornell) comes to GMU via Yale and Columbia, as well as a few other places, with over thirty years of dedicated university teaching and administrative experience. Dr. Ancekewicz's teaching and research interests focus on the intersections of history, literature and philosophy, especially in, but not limited to, the French Renaissance and Early Modern periods (L'Ancien Régime), as well as on critical theory and on teaching and technology. Her scholarly work includes a recent book on The Critical Connection: The Question of History and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, published articles as well as numerous presentations at international, national and regional conferences.  Dr. Ancekewicz is currently working on several book projects on the arts of history and poetry in Early Modern France and Italy and on the representation of violence in print and text in the Early Modern period. She is teaching both French language and literary and cultural studies, including a new class on travel literature or on the "voyage" as theme and technique, and is piloting an advanced French language course using global simulation and virtual reality in spring 2009. Dr. Ancekewicz has also worked actively on the secondary to college transition, and is participating in the current revision of French AP examinations with ETS.

Professor emerita Esther N. Elstun is working in collaboration with the contemporary German poet, Gisela Hemau, on English translations of her poetry.  Six poems in the original German with Professor Elstun’s translations have been published in Sirena, an international journal of poetry, art and criticism in 2008( 1:17-29).  On October 24, 2008 Professor Elstun was an invited panelist at “Faculty Governance in Higher Education: A Conference Exploring the Roles and Responsibilities of Faculty” at the University of Mary Washington.  As a long-time member (and past officer) of theAAUP, she spoke from that perspective about the importance of tenure not only for the individuals who receive it, but for the institutions that grant it; and identified term-(also known as contract-, and contingency-) appointments as an assault on tenure that threatens both individuals and the  colleges and universities they serve.

 

Dr. Jennifer Leeman published two refereed journal articles (a critical discourse analysis of Spanish heritage language textbooks, and a critical history of Spanish teaching in the US) and co-edited a book on Spanish in the US.  With colleagues Lisa Rabin and Esperanza Román-Mendoza, she received a CHSS research grant and submitted an article on community heritage language programs. She also submitted an invited book chapter on heritage language teaching and a co-authored article manuscript on commodified language in DC’s Chinatown.
Leeman directed a new semester study abroad program in Madrid, led the reconstruction of the Spanish major and minor, and taught two new courses (an undergraduate synthesis course on multilingualism and a graduate course on language ideologies and Spanish). She organized a public openhouse on multilingualism in Virginia and coordinated Department co-sponsorship of a lecture by renowned linguist Prof. Rod Ellis. With colleague Kristina Olson she launched the MCL Faculty Research Forum series.

 

Dr. Laura J. Fyfe published a chapter titled: "Finding a Safe Space on Rue Felix-Faure" in the first edited book on the Senegalese author Ken Bugul, "Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices", Africa World Press, 2009. She  presented her research on French immigration and Beur literature at American University in Jan ‘09 and on her Wolof pedagogical materials in Illinois in April ‘09. She also attended the CIBER (Centers for International Business Education and Research) workshop on the "Creation of Mini-Cases for Business Language Classrooms" on November 8 at GWU with a number of her fellow language coordinators and was able to create three mini case studies for her Business French class. Dr. Fyfe led  study abroad groups to Rabat, Morocco in Jan ‘08, to Paris in July ‘08, to Guadeloupe in Jan ‘09 and will lead another group on her Study Tour in Senegal in July ‘09.

 

Dr. Anja Apitz completed her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Iowa (2007) and joined the MCL department in August 2008. In her first semester, she taught language courses at all levels and in spring 2009 she will develop two new courses, Business German and Advanced Writing. The latter will be connected to a university-wide project about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the help of her Adjunct instructors, she offered various extra-curricular activities, which increase students’ contact with German and develop a stronger sense of community.

 

Dr. Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez’s book, Alegorías del poder: la nueva comedia y las crisis del imperio, 1598-1659, has been accepted for publication by Tamesis Books and is scheduled to appear in 2009. He has four articles forthcoming in refereed journals: “Libertad, destino y poder en La hija del aire de Calderón” (Anuario Calderoniano); “Alegorías bíblicas del poder en el teatro de Tirso de Molina” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies); “Modernidad en la literatura gauchesca: carnavalización y parodia en el Fausto de Estanislao del Campo” (Hispania); and “Costello + Panza = Costanza: Paradigmatic Pairs in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and American Popular Culture” (The Journal of Popular Film & Television). His book review of Lois Parkinson Zamora’s The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2006) will appear in Modern Philology. Dr.  Carreño  served as the Faculty Director for the winter program in Guanajuato, Mexico.

 

Dr.Karl Zhang's book Xianggelila Weicheng (Shanggri-la Besieged:Self Selected Writings) Jiangxi Education Press,  June 2008， was on the non-fiction bestseller list of Sanlian Shudian (Equivalent to New York Times Bestseller List) in Beijing for two weeks in July. He was invited to the Voice of America's Issues and Opinions live television show on December 31, 2008 to discuss with the audience on the changes of the Chinese image in the West based on his research.

 

Dr. Martin Winkler's new book, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. (see image below)

 

Dr. Francien Markx joined the MCL department in Fall 2007 and has since taught various courses in German language, literature, and culture. She has also offered German literature in English translation for the university’s GenEd Program. This past semester Francien presented papers on German literature, opera and song at national conferences of the German Studies Association, the Goethe Society of North America, the American Society of 18th-century Studies and at the Goethe Institute in Washington D.C. She will be on leave the coming semester in order to work on her book project about the German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann.